Trusted Digital Labor: Storyraise 'Tech Lab' Transcript

Vince Greenfield

Good morning everyone. Welcome to the Nonprofit Virtual Tech Lab sponsored by Storyraise. This is a summit with four sessions designed for nonprofits looking to embrace cutting edge technology for fundraising and donor engagement. Today we are featuring top experts in tech for good and nonprofits, and each of these interactive sessions are exploring the latest trends and strategies to help your organization thrive in an increasingly digital world. My name is Vincent Greenfield and I’m the lead engineer at Storyraise and Storyraise is a solution for nonprofits to create personalized digital reports and videos. We have an amazing guest this morning, so welcome and thank you to Emily Groccia from Version2.ai, a tech company helping nonprofits with the idea of virtual fundraising using AI. So Emily, so happy to have you here today. Would you please just do us the honor of taking a minute to introduce yourself?

Emily Groccia

Sure. Thanks, Vince. I’m so excited to join you all today. I’m Emily Groccia. I am the Vice President of Customer Success at Givzey, and I’m also the director of our Version2.ai program, so the R and D program, developing and launching the world’s first autonomous fundraiser. I spent about 10 years in higher education advancement and the last five over on the tech side working directly with nonprofits and fundraisers to improve their fundraising at their individual shops. So I’m really excited to join you and talk about AI and fundraising today.

Vince Greenfield

Awesome. This should be a pretty fun conversation. So let’s start by looking at the current landscape. We all know that nonprofits and schools face some unique staffing challenges when it comes to fundraising. Could you start by sharing what you’re seeing out there in terms of hiring and resources, constraints for development teams?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, absolutely. So across the nonprofit landscape in general, there is a labor shortage. There’s a labor shortage overall in fundraising. And so what we see specifically is every organization’s classic donor pyramid. So you have the top of the pyramid that are your major gift donors. That represents usually somewhere from one to five percent of your organization’s donors. They’re in managed portfolios. You have humans managing those relationships. Then you have sort of the rest, the other 95 plus percent that are not being managed by a human, and typically right underneath those managed donors, you have another five to 10% perhaps that are what we typically term the rated, but unassigned the people that if you could hire another one, three, five human fundraisers, they would be the first ones in those assignments. They’re your pipeline. They’re the people that are giving at a pretty solid level maybe, but just not quite at that threshold to enter a major gift portfolio.

Maybe it’s your younger donor that isn’t quite ready for their first major gift yet. On the flip side too, maybe it’s some of the donors that have made major gifts in the past and are not necessarily going to be making another one in the next three years or so, so are not in that portfolio and those are the people you really want to be managing more of. But there’s two sort of problems here. One is budget constraints. So oftentimes an organization says, well, we’ve hired as much as our budget allows us to hire, but two, if that budget was increased exponentially, there’s a massive shortage in fundraisers. So we were at a summit in Washington, DC over the week and with two higher ed organizations, one has 20 open positions and another has 40 open positions, and their leaders said, we don’t believe we will be able to fill those positions the next six months and the next year. That’s really where we are as a landscape. Anecdotally, in the 15 years that I’ve been working in nonprofits and with advancement, I do not remember a time where a team said, yeah, we’re fully staffed. So yes, this is a critical problem in the last few years, but anyone that’s worked in the industry for any amount of time will tell you it is always a challenge within this industry to find the right talent, especially depending on the geographic location.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely. What do you think is the biggest challenge when it comes to that?

Emily Groccia

I think the biggest challenge here is that you want to be able to warm up that pipeline. Absolutely get those donors right below your managed ones, right? It’s important, but what they’re receiving right now is probably annual giving marketing, maybe some great segmented communications specific to what you know about them, their affinities or what they’ve given to in the past. But if you ask those donors about their experience with their organization, they probably will say that they typically hear from you when you’re asking for money or maybe when you’re thanking them for a gift, but not a lot in between. They don’t get those personalized touchpoints that someone in a gift office or portfolio receives. When I know an event is happening in your area, Vince and I can say, “Hey, Vince, I’m sure you got this, but I just want to make sure you saw that this is happening and I want to personally invite you.” Those are the things that just don’t happen outside of those managed portfolios, but are really important to continue to strengthen your connection so that when you are ready to make a major gift, you’re even warmer and ready for that handoff to a major gift officer.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds solid. So since we’re on the subject of donors, what type of donors are typically getting the most attention and why? And furthermore, what type of attention is it that they’re getting?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, the donors that are getting the most attention are the ones in those managed portfolios. So a human gift officer is working with a management strategy. So they are giving those folks anywhere from eight to 12 touch points over the course of the year. They’re cultivating, they’re identifying what the end ask goal is, and they’re sort of backing out a plan as to how they’re going to get there. They’re getting personalized stewardship, they’re getting specific stories of impact related to their gift, and they’re really being sort of brought along and brought closer to the organization. They feel really heard and that they also feel that the information they’re receiving is personal to their connection, and that’s what’s happening with those donors that are getting the most attention.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely, and do you feel like there is a gap or a problem, I should say, that isn’t being addressed?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s where the pipeline is, right? So the gap here is the pipeline. It makes sense to manage some of your $10 donors in perpetuity in an annual fund giving marketing campaign. But where you are, where most organizations feel the most concerned is in those donors who might be their next campaign donor. Maybe they feel really good about the people that they’re managing right now for this campaign, but when you ask them, what are you doing to get the next group ready for the next campaign? That’s where there tends to be the most resource constraints.

Vince Greenfield

Interesting. If you wouldn’t mind, just shed a little bit of light for me on that whole problem because it’s just something that I’m not too familiar with, so it would be interesting to just hear more about why that’s the case.

Emily Groccia

Yeah, sure. So when you look at the donors in that pool, those are the ones who, if I’m a major gift donor, most of the time my major gift capability or capacity does have an end date. Every organization will have a couple of donors that will give major gifts for their lifetime and leave a massive planned gift at the end as well. But others maybe have the capacity to give one to maybe three major gifts throughout the course of their lifetime, but they can’t sustain your organization forever, right? There always has to be a pipeline right underneath that’s flowing up into the top of the pyramid. Those top of the pyramid donors will not be there forever. They probably won’t be there in your next campaign except maybe those couple that I just mentioned. So it’s just as important for the longevity of your organization’s philanthropy to be thinking about and cultivating that group right underneath.

And if I’m a major gift officer, when I do my portfolio reviews every year there’s a segment of people that are moving out and ideally I want warm donors moving in. I don’t want cold donors with high capacity, but have maybe never given over a thousand dollars to the organization or have never personally engaged or had any type of communication outside of marketing communications. When I call that donor, it’s going to be a lot harder to get a hold of them. It’s going to be harder to really strengthen their philanthropy at the speed that I need to do that.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely. So let’s switch gears here for a second. I want to talk a little bit about AI. So how do you see artificial intelligence filling the need for more of that one-on-one personalized engagement with donors, especially those who don’t give tens of thousands of dollars, but are still important to the organization’s long-term sustainability?

Emily Groccia

When it comes to the donors that are engaging with our technology, the virtual engagement officer, those donors are still receiving the organization’s one to many communications. They’re still getting the mass emails, they’re still getting your end of year solicitations. They’re still being invited to events in a one to many capacity. But there’s two sorts of things that AI helps differentiate with these donors and bring them along a little bit further. One is they’re getting more personalized engagement throughout the whole year. So I mentioned those eight to 12 touchpoints that a gift officer would have with their donors. AI or the virtual engagement officer that our Version2.ai program has developed also provides eight to 12 touchpoints in that similar management strategy.

Vince Greenfield

Interesting.

Emily Groccia

So for example, like I mentioned, if there’s an event, maybe the virtual engagement officer might invite you to it. If you have previously responded to the virtual engagement officer with any sort of indication of interest in the basketball team, well, when the basketball team makes the tournament, certainly the time you’re going to talk about that, you will hear from the virtual engagement officer about that news. That’s news that’s going to be delivered to you that the virtual engagement officer might not deliver to someone that’s only engaged about academic scholarships. So there’s lots of different personalized opportunities there that AI can do in a very different way than marketing communications. And then the other one, Vince, is that there’s two-way communication. So when you receive communication from an organization, unless it’s a survey, you don’t really respond, right? Because there’s not a person on the other side of that individual communication, and it doesn’t usually ask you to respond.

It might have a call to action, hopefully it might have a “register for an event,” it might “make a gift” button, but it’s not really asking you about your motivations and your connections. And that’s where the two-way communication in AI is really, really incredible. It’s not just segmentation. It’s encouraging a response from the donor to understand what’s most important to them and what connects them to the organization and what motivates their philanthropy. So it’s an opportunity to learn more about the donor, but it’s also giving the donor the opportunity to share more, which is what we really see donors are blown away by.

Vince Greenfield

That’s actually a really interesting take and something that I really didn’t think about enabling the belief for donors to respond more and to interact more. So that’s a completely different spin compared to how I usually think about it. So that’s quite amazing to hear actually.

Emily Groccia

Those are the best engagements. Everyone loves the dollars. Everyone loves the amount the donors have given as a part of this program, and that’s obviously the end goal here for these organizations to increase support. But the magical moments for those of us who are so new to this space, because this has only been happening for the last four months, really, donors have been engaging with autonomous fundraising for the first time back in September, is when this whole thing started. So if you haven’t seen one of these engagements, that for sure is the moment where you see people’s eyes sort of go, whoa, that is cool that I can receive a communication from a VEO. I can respond. The VEO can understand that response and either give me information, tell me what my last gift was to if I want to know or how much my last gift was, or even say things like, “Do you want to learn more about events in your area?” I keep going back to that topic for some reason, but do you want to learn more about events in your area? And someone can say yes, and they can say, okay, great. I’ll send you the next event that comes through, or can you share your impact story? And those have been really, really important, I think, for organizations to be able to see.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely. And do you see a significant difference in engagement through that sort of touchpoint of AI and responses and things like that?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, I mean, so we are just starting to dig into some of the data here, and I think what’s been really interesting to me and to a lot of folks is that there are some things that we all assumed six months ago would be the case. We assume AI is something for young people. We assume that text messaging is something that older donors might not engage with as well. Both of those are totally incorrect. Based on what we’ve seen over the last few months, one of our cohort partners has a planned giving portfolio. The virtual engagement officer is engaging only with planned giving prospects, so they’re not zero to ten years out of school. And this is a higher ed customer, obviously, and they have the highest engagement out of anyone. Those donors are so excited to reminisce, to share their stories, to share why they give. There was a great one a couple of weeks ago about someone that was a former professor at a university and said, “Students really inspired me.” I was inspired to help students while I was there. Now that I’ve been retired for ten years, the way that I can continue to support students is through philanthropy and also here’s why I support this one specific program, and those are the stories that I think are really incredible and really define how this is going to change the game here.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely strong. So let’s talk results for a second. What kinds of improvements or successes are you seeing from nonprofits that use AI to bolster? I think you touched on one of them already, but are there any more success stories you can share or any metrics that you can point to?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, definitely. So I mentioned the numbers obviously. So we publish on Version2.ai a dashboard of results across autonomous fundraising. We publish that twice a week. So far, the virtual engagement officer has raised about $530,000 in gifts and has about 3,500 engagements. Those engagements we use case definitions for. So either for us, the VEO’S capabilities, that’s either two-way engagement or that’s in about four months. So we had our first cohort of innovation partners go live this past fall, so in about four months, those are our numbers. We have two more cohorts that we’ll be adding to those numbers over the coming weeks. So you’ll see those change pretty drastically.

Vince Greenfield

That’s impressive.

Emily Groccia

Yeah. The other thing we’ve just started to do now that we have four months of data is really dig into that data a little bit deeper. $530,000, what does that mean? Where are those gifts coming from? Who are the donors that are making those gifts? Is that higher, lower lapsed, all those things. So the first set of data that we just published, 15% of those gifts were coming from SBU and lapsed donors. And we have a couple of portfolios that are really focused on that, really focused on reacquisition of lapsed donors and donors who haven’t given in the last couple of years and bringing them back in. And that’s one of the hardest things to do, I think as a fundraiser, is not to always just increase retention and capture the people that gave last year, but reach back a little bit and really bring back those supporters.


Someone was on a call with an innovation partner yesterday, and they said they had 12,000 donors to their organization in five years, or I believe ten years ago, and they had 8,000 this year. So that’s a pretty big drop from 12,000 to 8,000, but they want to go back and start to really recapture some of those lapsed donors. And so that’s something that’s important to them in terms of results. The other thing just anecdotally, not from the data, but the engagement, we’ve talked a lot about already this morning here, but we recently, one of our innovation partners is Jackson, Jackson Labs, and we have this that we’ve shared publicly, so happy to share it today. But they had their VEO reaching out, understanding donors’ motivations to make gifts, and one of those donors came back and specifically said why they give to J, and specifically why they give to that scientific research lab and how that research lab’s approach is differentiated from maybe another one.


Then the VEO was able to recognize that that was a really good story and a really good response, and just like a human fundraiser could say, Hey, would you mind if Jackson uses your story to inspire others to give? And that donor said, “Yeah, of course, I would love that.” And so then not only does that strengthen the donor’s relationship with Jackson, but also gives Jackson the ability to then share that donor’s impact story. And that’s exactly what a human gift officer does. It not only brings that donor along, but recognizes the opportunity for maybe that donor to inspire others.

Vince Greenfield

That’s amazing, and I think that perfectly fits with the next thing I wanted to get into, which is the whole donor engagement side after the gift is made, of course. So donor relations, it doesn’t stop once someone clicks donate. So how are you, or how should nonprofits use technology and the human touch combined and intertwined to deepen that relationship?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, so obviously, of course, every donor should be thanked, right? If you’re a donor in a major gift officer portfolio, you’re getting a personalized thank you at a minimum you’re hearing from your gift officer and hopefully you’re hearing from your organization’s leadership and then further down the line, that doesn’t stop, right? You’re hopefully hearing about the impact of that gift, specifically not just giving to this organization that supports X, Y, and Z, but understanding well, this donor gave to this fund or had an interest even if it was a general annual fund, the donor gave to that because of a specific reason. And so as a human, then we can talk to that donor about the impact of their gift even to an annual fund in a more specific way. And that’s exactly what AI can help us do as well. So the virtual engagement officer actually sends robotic handwritten notes.

So you can still get a physical, tangible, handwritten thank you note because that is hopefully what your human gift officers are doing. So there are really neat tools out there. We partner with a company called Ignite Post that will send the donor in the mail a note card, which is awesome. Understanding the donors’ motivations, asking questions. I think that’s the most important in the follow-up and look for other things that a donor might be interested in supporting. That’s part of stewardship too, is thanking, but also looking to expand the donor’s interest and access to your organization so that you can continue to strengthen those connections, right beyond just thinking, okay, the donor gave to the law school, and so the donor must obviously only be interested in the law school. So that’s the information we’re going to give them, and that’s what we’re going to solicit them for next, because you want to ask more questions. That might’ve been where they gave to in this campaign, but that might not be their major gift interest in the future.

Vince Greenfield

Absolutely. That’s strong. So I’m excited that you all are delving into this innovative and future forward thinking technology. Where do you think this idea of AI centered fundraising is headed in the next five to ten years?

Emily Groccia

Yeah, so I’ll go backwards first.


Five years ago, our founder, Adam Marel, previous to Givzey, founded a company called Gravity, and it was the first AI tool in the nonprofit fundraising space. And when I went out and trained teams on Gravity, I had to explain what AI was, and I would use Netflix and I would say, “You know how you watch Netflix and maybe you watch one show and then it knows what you want to watch from there? That’s machine learning.” That’s a form of AI because people really, truly, they might’ve been able to tell you that it stands for artificial intelligence, but they weren’t really sure what that meant, and that hopefully has changed drastically in the last five years. You go to any nonprofit fundraising conference, hopefully any industry conference at all, and AI is all over the agenda.

Vince Greenfield

It indeed is.

Emily Groccia

A lot of it in the last five years, pretty much all of it, is assistive AI. So it’s helping me maybe be more efficient. It’s tools I as a fundraiser that might be able to use to draft emails to my donors, maybe to help prospect research teams identify the right donors, those types of assistive AI tools. But now in the next five years, autonomous AI, that’s where the future of AI is, and specifically for fundraising, it’s digital labor. University of Toledo is one of our partners, and they were the first partner whose champion was from their HR team because she recognized that digital labor or autonomous fundraising is going to be a function of HR. We’re working with a lot of partners right now on what their digital labor plans are for the next one, three, five years.


So now you might have 60 human fundraisers and two virtual engagement officers, and just like those staffing plans, sort of admin flow with campaigns you might staff up during a campaign, staff down in between. You do the same thing in planning your digital labor. So it’s a campaign, maybe there’s a higher ratio of humans to a slightly lower ratio of digital gift officers, and in between when you’re staffing down a little bit, maybe your digital labor has to staff up because you don’t have quite the budget that you have during a campaign. And so in the next five years, that’s really where we see digital labor sitting alongside those human teams and helping organizations really reach their goals.

Vince Greenfield

That’s amazing. Totally amazing. So that’s it for my questions for today. Emily, I want to thank you so much for joining the Nonprofit Virtual Tech Lab today, brought to you by Storyraise.